Dr. Xiaodong Lin - Learning from the Rest of the World

Learner-centered pedagogy has been taken up by some international
development agencies -- not least as a survival strategy for teachers
with sole responsibility for managing classrooms of a hundred students
or more.

But it may be that the practice doesn't always transfer wholesale to other cultures.

"When
you see it in action in some places, you can see things about it that
are built specifically on American values and assumptions about
resources," says Lesley Bartlett, TC Associate Professor of Education.
"Students who aren't used to challenging a teacher's ideas won't feel
comfortable with this pedagogy. Another issue is that when five or 10
kids have to share a single textbook, they can't do much independent
work at home. And language policy can be a barrier, too. In Tanzania,
for example, students shift from Swahili to English in secondary school,
and they often have great difficulty expressing themselves in a
language they're struggling to learn."

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